A fully embedded font could be used after extraction by the books purchaser. A partly embedded one will most likely have too many "holes" to be of use for pretty everything than the book it was shipped within.
Given that some of the fonts are costly I understand that a font creator rather dislikes the idea of people getting potential access to a font worth X after having paid just a fraction of ot for an epub file.

Although in practise, this is a silly fear. It might have been valid once, when computer fonts first came in back in 1987 and digital distribution was harder. In 2012, when if you want a font without paying for it there are numerous pirate sites and torrents, worrying about your fonts being embedded in documents is silly.

Although in practise, this is a silly fear. It might have been valid once, when computer fonts first came in back in 1987 and digital distribution was harder. In 2012, when if you want a font without paying for it there are numerous pirate sites and torrents, worrying about your fonts being embedded in documents is silly.

And a sizeable number of FOSS font makers who just want attribution or a copy of what you did with their work.

And a sizeable number of FOSS font makers who just want attribution or a copy of what you did with their work.

That is what I do when I need international glyphs (I work for a commercial publishing house). I embed DejaVu with an attribution in the colophon text. The attribution is not necessary as far as I can tell, but it's a nice thing to do

That is what I do when I need international glyphs (I work for a commercial publishing house). I embed DejaVu with an attribution in the colophon text. The attribution is not necessary as far as I can tell, but it's a nice thing to do

Although in practise, this is a silly fear. It might have been valid once, when computer fonts first came in back in 1987 and digital distribution was harder. In 2012, when if you want a font without paying for it there are numerous pirate sites and torrents, worrying about your fonts being embedded in documents is silly.

Just like publishers and DRM, really.

It may be silly, but the reality is that those of us who make ebooks commercially have to live with it. I'm all for embedding subsets if it can be done without a lot of gyrations. I use disclaimers (e.g., "we assume that if you're giving us a font file, you've properly licensed it," etc.) but I do worry, given what's happened with cases of image licensing infringements, etc., that someday I'll have Adobe on my doorstep because some doofus didn't properly license one of their fonts. My alternative is to run out and do the licensing myself, and charge the client, but quite bluntly, that starts to get on my nerves for a variety of reasons, which aren't relevant to this discussion.

Is any of this moving forward? Or did the discussion that Calibre might do it or be made to do it kill the momentum? We don't use Calibre for production--although I adore it for our cataloging--so I'd be interested in this. Can someone advise, if they're actively working on it? I can't code for beans (in Python or whatever), but if I could assist some other way...?